Lonesome Languages

In the title sequence to the movie Babel, Brad Pitt, in voice over, recounts a version of the eleventh chapter of Genesis: "In the beginning, all the Lord's people, from all over the world, spoke one language. Nothing they proposed was impossible for them. But fearing what the spirit of man could accomplish, the Lord said, 'Let Us go down and confuse their language so that they may not understand each other's speech.'"


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This afternoon, I was at the bookstore, browsing the fiction/literature section and I came across a novel entitled, The God of Small Things. The book takes place in Kerala, India. I decided to sit down and leaf through a couple of pages to see if anything about the novel caught my interest. It didn’t. However, I was reminded of a peculiar feature belonging to the language spoken in Kerala - Malayalam. The names given to people in Malayalam are often times not names in the Western sense. You will not find them on birth certificates, nor can they be labeled nicknames in the proper sense. Rather, labels are given to people based on their relation to other people.

For instance, one female character in the novel was named Kochamma, which roughly translates, ‘little mother.’ Of course, she wasn’t known as ‘little mother’ all her life. One could only imagine the plight of a young girl going through middle school with such a name! Instead, she came to assume the name later in life when her younger sister had a child. The child, then, had a mother, a ‘little mother’ in the form of her mother’s sister, and a ‘big mother’ in the form of her mother’s mother.

While it might make some sense for the child itself to apply the title of ‘little mother’ to her mother’s sister, as much as one would apply the name ‘aunt’ in the West, this is not how it happens. It appears that everyone except the child refers to the aunt as little mother. The title of little mother, then, seems to supplant the aunt’s actual proper name. The rules that determine the name the child will use in reference to its aunt is far more complex and takes into account whether the sister-relation is by blood or by marriage, whether the sister is older or younger, and whether the aunt is maternal or paternal. Such naming rituals presumably served as verbal scorecards in houses that might contain extended families, two or three generations deep. (Also, on a side note, if you are the wife of a priest, everyone calls you ‘little mother,’ whether or not you have a niece or nephew, or even a sister, for that matter.)

In the West, first names are individualistic and surnames are growing to be, the latter often retained through marriage. It’s hard for us to fathom such a relational naming scheme. Indeed, one has to wonder if having things defined by their relation to other things has an effect on one’s world view. Conversely, in the West, does the appearance of individuality by way of naming schemes also color one’s approach to the outside world and to the self? That is to say, does the East have a multitude of words for relationships, because their world-view is relational to begin with? Or is their world-view relational, because their language defines relationships in an ever-present and exact manner? A related question is: how much of one’s world-view is lost, when one loses one’s language?

I recently came across this statistic: of the 6,000 languages spoken in the world today, one-half are not spoken by this generation’s children. I’m reminded of a certain Giant Galapagos Tortoise. I think I mentioned an NPR story awhile back about a tortoise that was believed to be the last member of his species. People who are in charge of such designations deem a species to be extinct when there is only one member of that species still living. Thus, this 80 year old tortoise will live his last 120 years, belonging to a species that is already extinct. He was accordingly dubbed Lonesome George. By that same standard, some 3,000 languages are already extinct, uttered among the living like voices of the dead. 3,000 Lonesome Tongues. 3,000 Lonesome Worldviews.

Of course, every language I’ve ever heard of, either dead of alive, would likely number in the dozens, rather than thousands. So why should I give pause over the fate of these obscure, and soon to be forgotten, dialects? For me, the significant lies in the fact that language is not merely a means of communication, but a rich tapestry of human life experiences. Just as sedimentary rock preserves fossil records, so too does language faithfully record a people’s history, their culture, and their philosophy.

Take English, for example. The very fact that Americans speak English tells the story of the British colonization of the New World. The presence of many French cognates, in turn, harkens back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. A grocery list of items arrived along ancient trade routes, including the word tea from China, the Arabic words saffron, caraway, coffee, and cotton, as well as the Malayalam words mango and teak, which arrived by boat. Our court system’s preservation of verbatim Latin points to the foundational tenets borrowed from Roman Law. That the word philosophy itself comes from Greek tells a story unto itself. Point being, even without understanding the meaning of a single English word, one could tell a great deal about a people from the structure and characteristic of a language itself. A death of a language, then, is also the loss of all of the life experiences and insights that helped shape a language, that which breathes life into this spiritless typeface.

Suppose an ancient civilization held wisdom that would relieve some of our modern problems, or, suppose further, that they held some beauty that would appeal to our modern sensibilities. “I dream of lost vocabularies that might express that which we no longer can,” writes Jack Gilbert in "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart." Perhaps, then, the homogenization of language, is also the homogenization of wisdom. But who, if any, among us would boast that theirs should be the chosen tongue, that theirs is the only one to get it all right, that theirs is the Almighty Language? Maybe it is better to equate the loss of language to a loss of wisdom, rather than a return to it. Maybe we are experiencing a flattening of the Earth and a return to a blander, more two-dimensional understanding of the world.

I'm also concerned about this topic, because I fear that our language, this very language in which I'm writing, will be forgotten in time. I wonder whether men of the future can live richly without words such as ‘renaissance’? ‘Passion’ or ‘butterfly’? And what would they call that great beast we so aptly named ‘hippopotamus’? And, if on the eve of the renouncement of such words, I am able, I will hurriedly scribble down my favorites on scraps of paper and bury them in a locked chest in my backyard, even if never to be found, then at least to have been left with some dignity. Still, I cannot help but imagine an archaeologist in some great distant future unearthing this treasure chest and lifting its top. Can you see the expression on his face when he first encounters 'serendipity' and ‘gossamer,’ along with my detailed instructions on how they may be put to use?